Location of the winning bidder:

Full Category:

Starting Price:

$10.01

Sale Price:

$112.50

Q & A

Artist Bio:

Tara Kelton is an artist living in Bangalore, India. She received her MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2009. Her works use a variety of media to explore the physical human gesture as it is mediated and altered by commonly available / emerging technologies. Tara has had solo exhibitions of her work at Banner Repeater + or-bits.com (UK) and at GallerySKE (Delhi and Bangalore). Her work has also been shown at the ZKM (Germany), in the Kochi Muziris Biennale (India), Clark House Initiative (India), Vox Populi (USA), the Queens Museum of Art (USA), Franklin Street Works (USA) and the Centre for Internet and Society (India). Tara has taught at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology and she is the founder-director of T-A-J, a residency program in Bangalore.

Curator:

Ghidini & Modrak

Artist Statement:

I am selling a single image’s worth of space in my brain, where my mind will function as a hard drive / memory card. The winner of the auction can provide me with a single image that I will store for them – just like with a digital memory card, the purchaser will be able to access the image, rewrite it with a new one, delete it, or transfer it, and will have access to this space in my brain for as long as I am alive. When the purchaser wishes to store an image in their “mind-memory drive”, they present me with an image (either in person or over a digital chat program), which I spend approximately one hour “writing” to my brain. When the purchaser wishes to access the image, I will draw the image for them and this drawing will then be handed / posted to them, depending on their location. In the uncertain times we live in, a single human’s memory could be a more stable (yet blurry, indefinite) form of data than digital storage, which can be erased, hacked and whose shelf life is precarious (or a human memory can at least serve as a genuinely alternative form of back-up). Unlike with a typical hard drive, the image will be unique each time it is retrieved; it will fade over time, behaving more like older, analog forms of storage, like a photograph, or even an oral history, where the storage device/medium alters what is being stored, and gets woven together with the memory.

After the purchase, the winner bidder received the HMD Quick Start Guide, a copy of which you can view here.